“Some people don’t care about UX.”

“Some people don’t care about UX,” he said.

After he said those words, he went on to describe the data behind market research. But for me? I couldn’t hear anything he said. Namely because it sounded uninformed, uneducated, and most of all, ignorant. When he said UX, he meant user experience. The field that I specialized in for more than the last decade.

I countered with the fact that user experience is meant to be seamless. It’s not just graphic design. It’s not what you see on the screen and how you interact with it. Great user experience, and perhaps even product design or experience design depending on the context, considers all areas of impact. It might be the platform (computers that need updates, mobile phones on 4G) or the context of use (lacking great cellular signal, in a hands-free environment). It must consider the right information to deliver, the tasks that need to be completed. And even more so, it needs to be informed by user behavior in the past, present, and the future. It must be informed by repeated behavior, by the way that people navigate through user interface, by the agility of those users, and potential conflicts that exist in this busy world.

And so, I was surprised and not surprised by my sudden intensity. As if he struck my sense of identity and questioned it. But perhaps it was the dismissive way he made the statement as if user experience did it all wrong. My friend called it mansplaining. There was a moment where I wanted to ask, “Did you have a bad experience in regards to the term user experience? Why do you think user experience doesn’t matter? What do you really think user experience includes?” and of course, “why are you saying this? when you know perfectly well that this meetup would include designers?”

But my ear wasn’t feeling sympathetic, empathetic, or compassionate anymore. All I felt was this displeasure that I had felt many times in my career. Where I would need to explain what I do. For most cases outside of my projects, it’s simply “oh it’s just design. it’s to make things easier to use.” Sometimes, I drop the subject when people believe the wrong thing, because it’s not worth correcting. Yet when I am in a safe place where I expect everyone to understand the definition where I don’t have to defend myself or educate people, I am simply appalled and wonder what it means for the future of the industry. There’s a sadness that lies in all of this. That for some people, they don’t care about UX, so that means people like myself…will constantly be devalued. And the skills won’t matter at all.

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